In complex business intelligence systems, it is common to have to deal with issues concerning the differences in data representation, schemas, and types of data source. Within business intelligence systems a content management subsystem stores, serves, and manages static and dynamic application objects that are required by other Business Intelligence subsystems to perform an activity. These objects are created according to application needs and include data source definitions, report definitions, pre-assembled web pages, and Adobe Acrobat PDF documents.
Thus organizations use content management software as the primary source of both static and dynamic metadata required to run a business intelligence application. The content management software provides structure and checks and balances to ensure the integrity and authorized access to the information under its responsibility.
In BI systems, many application objects are required to be shared between various instances of an application suite. This sharing of application objects is required in order to replicate the same business application on several homogeneous or heterogeneous computer systems. This includes situations where a third-party developer packages a collection of reports, for use with a particular business intelligence system (such as ReportNet™ by Cognos Corporation), for specific industries, such as retailers, and offers such collections of reports for sale. These reports rely on specific arrangements of data sources, access policies, configuration information, and other parameters that relate the information in the reports. This means that the definition of this other information must also be distributed with the collection of reports. It is also usual for the third-party developer or exporter to define limitations on the configuration or organization of the importing or target system.
In current BI systems, the processes used to share data and metadata among computer systems often require the use of complicated import and export definitions, third party tools, and require constant user interaction. Administrator users of source systems may spend hours configuring metadata exchanges and attempt several tries before a successful exchange is achieved. Often administrator users must exchange installments of application objects until all application objects have been successfully exchanged between source and target systems.